Comp 381 Final Story
by RomeUNC
Summary: This is a conversation between two friends, as one realizes the extent to which the other has no life outside of the Internet.


A chair fell down, spilling a basket of neatly-folded laundry, as a young man rushed to answer and incoming phone call on Skype. He fumbled with the mouse several times but eventually clicked the "Answer" button. His excitement faded instantly upon noticing whose call he had answered.

"Hey, Phil," he said.

"Hey, Ross," Phil said. "You sound a bit disappointed."

"Well, I thought you were someone else."

"It has my profile pic and name and everything. Who else did you think it would be?"

"Well, I was _expecting_ a call from someone else, and I rushed to answer, hoping it was her."

"Who's her?" Phil asked with a grin.

"This girl I met last night at a party."

"Wait, you met a girl at a party? Wait, you were at a party? Wait, you did something other than play games in your room?"

"Well, my roommate gave me a lift to the supermarket, since I don't have a car and all, and he got a text from a friend about a party going on, and he went straight there without taking me back here first, so I kinda got…pulled in. Anyway, since I was there, I decided to mingle. I met this hot girl and started talking to her, and we exchanged Skype IDs."

"Whoa, hold on, you guys exchanged Skype IDs? Do you not have a cell phone either? I mean, that is…really weird."

"She wouldn't've exchanged hers with me, if she was creeped out by it, though."

"She could've given you a fake one."

"No, I'm pretty sure that she and all her friends liked me. They were laughing the whole time, especially when I brought up exchanging Skype IDs. They thought I was funny."

"Dude, I think they were laughing at you. Did her Skype name even bring anything up when you tried to add her?"

"Dunno. I was tired when I finally got back and just went to sleep."

"Well, check."

He quickly pulled the slip of paper on which the girl had written her Skype name from his desk drawer. He laid it out and typed "tricksychicksee" into the contact search. A result came up.

"Ha! The name clears out. She _wasn't_ lying. Ha, ha, HA!

"Where's it say she lives?"

Ross looked at his screen again and frowned.

"Glasgow, Scotland," he shamefully admitted.

"Seems pretty far for a girl at a party in Raleigh. Anyway, with this depressing shit aside, let's get down to the usual: CoD. I'm feelin' like Modern Warfare 2 today."

"Actually, I think I'm gonna have to get back to you on that."

"What? Since when have you backed away from some CoD time?"

"See, I thought this girl was gonna call, and I thought that we'd ease into some phone sex or maybe even cybering, if I were lucky, so I'd been putting off jacking off to sort of save myself up for that."

"Ugh, gross, man! You didn't need to tell me that!"

"Yeah, and since that's no longer the case, I'm going go ahead and do what I had originally planned to do. Talk to you in half an hour, Phil."

Later that night, Ross and Phil were playing Call of Duty, as they normally did. A game just ended, and they were waiting in the lobby. The next game was going to be Domination on Estate."

"Fuck, I hate this map. Vote to skip it," Ross said.

"You do? Since when?"

"What do you mean 'Since when'? I've always hated it, ever since that game with the team full of noobtubers."

"Yeah, that was like two years ago. Anyway, I voted to skip."

"Thanks." Ross paused. "We've known each other a little over two years now?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Why?"

"I think that's the longest I have ever maintained contact with anyone."

"The weirdness of that statement aside, that can't be true. What about people from school?"

"I was homeschooled."

"That explains a lot."

"I told you this before," Ross said, somewhat annoyed.

"Well, unlike you, my life doesn't revolve around people I meet on the Internet."

"Yeah, we have spent a lot less time together these past eight months. Although you've spent more time at it today, we almost always game for no more than two hours together per day. Sometimes, there are days when you don't even sign into Skype or Xbox live. Things were a lot better before you started college."

"I'm such a fiend for that, I know. But yeah, I decided to grow myself as a person when I started college, and that meant cutting certain things out of my life, like burgers, showers only every other day, and my sedentary lifestyle. Oh, the game's starting."

"Don't forget RuneScape."

"Are you still going on with that? A cartoony game like that wasn't going to be fun forever. At least I did not cut out Call of Duty."

"We both know that RuneScape was more fun. It's where we met."

"How was it more fun? You spend more time on that trying to pick up girls than you do quests or fighting, girls who are, in all honesty, either dudes trying to get free shit, or twelve-years-old, and you're…how old are you?"

"I'm twenty-two. You should know this by now."

"That's the thing. You're three years older than me. I'm still a freshman, and you're a senior, I take it, but you seem a lot more invested in being my friend than I am with you. Even when I had no life too, I didn't bury my mind so deep in this. I just waited for opportunities, and it turns out that I had to wait 'til college for those to come, but you've done nothing of the sort. No, don't come near me! He's got a rocket! Damn, that was close! Anyway, when was the last time that you actually went out, on your own, without being dragged into things?"

"I never have. Parties intimidate me, even the one last night. Social gatherings in general intimidate me. They remind me of my birthday party that my mother threw for me when I was eight."

"What happened then?"

Ross cringed slightly at first, but then he went on. "Well, Mom really wanted me to have a normal birthday. None of the other kids would come if invited, so she spent part of a PTA meeting convincing other parents to force their kids to come. Naturally, they were resentful, and they didn't like me anyway, so after they got dropped off, they did everything to ruin the party for me. They took all the candy from the piñata, gave presents to each other, made my dog pee on me, and ate the corner pieces of the cake—the corner pieces, for crying out loud!"

"Wait, they made your dog pee on you?"

"Yeah, one of them brought their own dog, who peed in our yard, so when my dog tried to pee in that same spot to preserve his territory, they pushed me down in the path of the piss."

"Damn, that sucks. Wait a minute. You just said you were homeschooled. What's all this about the other kids and the PTA?"

"Well, I went to a regular school until I was eight, but after that party, I was 'the kid who washed in dog pee,' so I was homeschooled from then on."

"Jesus fucking Christ." Phil was at a loss for words at this point. He had heard some weird things from Ross before, but today was a little more than he had been able to handle in the past. The worst thing he had had to hear before was Ross's anecdote on the time that he had been left at the park by his father when he was twelve, which is one of the few things about Ross that Phil remembered. After narrowly avoiding a claymore blast, Phil knew what to say next.

"Dude, how are you going to function when you graduate and have to get a job?" Phil asked. "Where are you going to live?"

"Never really thought about it. I guess I will just move back in with Mom and take whatever job she finds for me. That's how I picked my university and my major. Of course, I'll have to wait 'til she comes back from her mission with the cult she joined last year."

"She joined a cult and left?"

"Yeah, all cult members pay dues for a year, and then they travel to Ecuador to make the sacred punch from the natural, tropical fruit there, the Fruit of Mother Earth, as Mom says it's called."

"Sacred punch?"

"Yeah, they all drink it together and achieve enlightenment."

Phil naturally knew what that meant, and he could see that getting Ross to understand that at this moment was more than what could be done, but he knew that he could not just let Ross wait forever for a mother that would never return.

"What about your father?" Phil asked."

"Remember when I told you about him leaving the park without me?"

"Yeah."

"Well, neither Mom nor I saw him again after that."

"And I thought that story could not possibly be more depressing."

"Yeah, this stuff is kind of depressing, I suppose. It doesn't bother me too much, though, since I otherwise have such a fulfilling life."

"Your life is fulfilling? I've got to hear this."

"Sure it is. I'm Level 117 on Runescape and just got out of a relationship with an excessively needy chick on there. Bitch needed Blood Runes whenever her therapist was unavailable. Yes, she was _that_ type, know what I mean?  
"Yeah, _that_ type," Phil said facetiously.

"Anyway, my Youtube profile has twenty-three subscribers, my Twitter has 12 subscribers, and I recently made my fiftieth Facebook friend. Then I recently got that video editing program to make my own for-real web series. That's gonna be loads of fun. So yeah, with all that, I don't really have time to think about when my Mom will come back or what I'll do for a living."

"But that stuff's really important."

"Don't worry. I have a back-up plan, and I have a back-up for my back-up."

"Which are?"

"If moving back in with Mom doesn't work, I'll use my web series to reach Internet fame and take care of myself from the profits. If that doesn't work, I'll start trading Runescape gold in for real life gold."

"It's called money."

"Isn't it basically the same thing, though?"

"I guess. Anyway, as great as those two plans sound, wouldn't it at least be nice to have a face to talk to?"

"That's what video calls are for."

"But what if you need to get a job for a while until your success kicks off? You need to meet your employer in person."

"We live in the age of teleconferencing."

"Yeah, but it means a lot more to print out a résumé, throw on a suit, and shake the boss's hand."

"Well, I never mentioned this, but two weeks ago, I did just that when applying for a spot as a moderator for Runescape. I wore my best suit in the video conference and sent them my résumé through file sharing. I didn't get to shake their hands, but if I can do two out of three, I am probably good. Speaking of good, this game is going pretty well. Maybe you should play this long more often."

"How long have we been playing?"

"Four hours. Where did you get this extra time today?"

"Me and my girlfriend just broke up. She's a year ahead and transferring after this semester, so we decided to end things now."

"Bummer, man. Guess that's another thing to add to the list of fulfilling things in life."

"That I'm single now?"

"No. I was referring to the fact I get to play loads of Call of Duty with my best friend."

"Ross, slow down a moment…I'm your best friend?"

"Well, yeah. We hang out on a regular basis, you were the first person to send me a request on Facebook, we both have "dragon" in our gamertags, and you don't block me when I tell you about my crushes on female Anime characters."

"Guess I never realized how much I was appreciated."

"Yep, and now that you're single again, and with the school year coming to a close, we can go back to our old habit no-lifing it to the max."

At that moment, the host for their game left, and the game was dropped.

"Well, that sucks some tremendous ass," Ross griped. "We were doing so well."

Phil, however, was not worried about the game being dropped. Tonight he had learned more about Ross than he had all the times they had played before combined. It was more than he had ever cared to learn, certainly, but he could not help but to notice the similarities. His father had also left him and his mother. He too had been homeschooled most of his childhood, and when put back into regular schooling for his last two years of high school, he had ended up having a very embarrassing and traumatic experience at the prom. The only reason that he had cut back on his heavily Internet-centered lifestyle was because his computer had been wrecked by the sprinkler system in his dorm, which had been activated by some stoners on the third floor, which essentially forced him to entertain himself by other means.

Now that he was about to go through the first long period of time outside of college, without a girlfriend or anything to hitch him to reality, he feared that he might slip back into a lifestyle that he knew full well was bad for him. He liked Ross. He would not call him a best friend, and there was a time when he did think of Ross as such, before college. Even so, he knew, then and there, that his relationship with Ross could do nothing but hold him back, and Phil knew that there was only one way to deal with that.

"I think I have had enough for tonight," Phil said.

"Yeah, it's getting to be time for RuneScape for me anyway," Ross said. "Guess I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Yeah. Good luck, man."

"That's a funny way to say goodbye. Whatever, bye."

Phil ended the call and signed out of Skype knowing that that would be his last conversation with Ross. He sat quietly for a moment, and then he muttered to himself, "At least I only ever get crushes on Harry Potter characters." After that, he shut down his desktop and made his way to bed.


End file.
